Jerome and I didn’t dance together, exactly, but we did remain side by side. Every once in a while, he would (seemingly accidentally) touch my waist or my arm. Anything more than that would have been too much of a statement, but I felt I got the message. He also had prefect jobs to do, so he would regularly disappear to refill bowls of food or tend the bar. That was another strange thing—the bar. An actual bar, with actual beer. We had tickets that allowed us two pints each. I have absolutely no idea how this was managed. Jerome had tried to explain it to me—how even though the law was that you had to be eighteen to drink in a pub, the circumstances varied, and at a closed event with teachers somehow this was legal. I got one of my beers, but I was jumping around and sweating too much to drink it. I would have vomited instantly. But two beers seemed to be nothing to the average English student. Everyone else gulped them down, and I was pretty sure that the two-ticket rule was not being very strictly enforced.

As the night wore on, there was a not-unpleasant funk in the air, the scent of beer and dancing. I started to forget any time I wasn’t at this place, with the lights strobing against the stained glass and the stone walls, the teachers in the shadows, checking their phones out of sheer boredom.

In fact, at first I thought he was a teacher. He came up behind Jazza. The suit, the bald head.

“What’s the matter?” Jaz yelled happily.

Of course, she couldn’t see him, even though he was right at her back, standing right up against her. He stroked her shoulder lightly with the tips of his fingers. I saw her twitch a bit and flick at her wig. He stepped around and placed himself between Jazza and me.

“Come outside,” he said. “Do it now.”

I began to back away, very slowly.

“Where are you going?” she yelled.

“Bathroom,” I said quickly.

“Are you ill? You look—”

“No,” I yelled back, shaking my head.

Leaving that room was the hardest thing I’ve ever had to do. I felt the heat of everyone at my back. Outside, it was cold—bright cold, a lifting cold. Every single streetlight was on. Every light in every window. Everything to battle against the dark of the sky, the dark that went up and up and up forever. This thin little halo so low to the ground. The wind was kicking up a fury, spinning leaves and trash around us, and I remember thinking, This is it. I am walking into forever. It was almost funny. Life seemed downright accidental in its brevity, and death a punch line to a lousy joke.